The production at MRT originated at Albany’s Capital Repertory Theatre. Directed by Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill, it comes to us hook, line, and designers, with choreographer Adam Pelty playing Henry with grace and verve if perhaps too much pluck. The performer can be as annoying in his relentless physicality as his character is in his relentless optimism about pulling oneself up by one’s dancing-shoe straps. But Pelty neatly combines brooding with goofiness, and he is certainly agile. The dance routines, which include waltzes, fox trots, even the Castles’ signature Walk, are a pleasure. Pelty and the light-footed Stacey Harris, as pent-up if irrepressible Anna, partner with increasing skill, eventually floating across the floor of set designer Roman Tatarowicz’s begrimed studio in a way that would suggest fantasy escape even without the glimmering lights that form a starry sky, a pavilion at Coney Island, and the crystal chandeliers Henry pictures in his imagined world of gravity-defying elegance. Exercising their terpsichorean option, the pair prove that, as the title suggests, one can be off the beat and still in heady tandem.
Related:
It’s a man’s world, Shakespeare for dummies, Channeling Shakespeare, More 
- It’s a man’s world
It’s hardly Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work, but in the Bard’s early career, Titus Andronicus was one of his most popular plays.
- Shakespeare for dummies
No, it's not sponsored by CliffsNotes. But The Complete Works William Shakespeare (Abridged) , as ably demonstrated by the Contemporary Theater Company (through August 14), shows that the bane of phys-ed majors can be more fun than a barrel of bodkins.
- Channeling Shakespeare
Cardenio , an early-17th-century play in which Shakespeare may well have had a hand, has been MIA since its debut and will doubtless remain so.
- Sifting Shakespeare
“For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the bottom of God’s secrets.” That quotation from the 1557 Geneva Bible’s First Corinthians is the unlikely foundation of Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars .
- Quake and Shake
A tenderhearted yarn spinner tells an anxious little girl a story about a talking bear hawking honey. A nerdy young debt collector comes home to find a six-foot amphibian bent on recruiting him to save Tokyo from a natural disaster. Both scenarios emanate from the brain of award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
- Love and war
Shakespeare might have subtitled All’s Well That Ends Well (presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Cambridge Family YMCA Theater through May 14) Smart Women, Foolish Choices .
- Disco ball
C-dust pinch-hits for fairy dust in The Donkey Show , Diane Paulus & Randy Weiner's disco-set riff on A Midsummer Night's Dream . Forget the juice of "a little western flower" with which fairy king Oberon and hench-sprite Puck mix up the libidos of the hormone-drenched characters charging through Shakespeare's Athenian wood.
- Eternal questions
Bard or beard — that is the question.
- The Shakespeare mystery
What Shakespeare wrote and what he didn’t — even without bringing the Earl of Oxford into it — is one of literature’s most enduring and enjoyable mysteries.
- The best on the boards
There have been a few muggings on the rialto this year.
- Poetry in motion
The eyes have it in Love’s Labour’s Lost , in which ocular imagery duels with what Harold Bloom calls a “florabundance of language” in the arch arias of courtier Berowne, who sees himself writ large in the “pitch-ball” peepers of Rosaline.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Entertainment, Dance, Performing Arts, More
, Entertainment, Dance, Performing Arts, Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare, Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky, Theater, Theater Reviews, John Kuntz, David Gammons, Less
